


Decomposition

by placentalmammal



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Abduction, Anal Sex, F/F, Gunplay, M/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 14:04:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4351703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/placentalmammal/pseuds/placentalmammal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A female courier rapes Cook-Cook in retribution. Warnings for every kind of violence and a semi-graphic description of animal butchering.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decomposition

The building was one of the few in the neighborhood still standing. It had a crumbling, unassuming facade made of gold-colored bricks. Two hundred years ago, the basement and ground floor had comprised a butcher's shop, and the upper story had been split into two one-bedroom apartments with a shared bathroom. Two hundred years after the war, it was just another derelict ruin deep in the heart of Fiend territory.

The enormous window on the first floor had been broken centuries earlier when society crumbled away and those left above ground took to looting. The meat was rancid by then, but the survivors, in their desperation, had thrown the cash register to the floor and taken what was inside. They smashed the glass display cases and tore the clock off the wall. They had taken whatever they thought might serve them after the end, and they had destroyed the rest.

The apartments on the second floor had not fared much better. The furniture had been upended, the tenants' cups and plates smashed against the floor. The covers were torn off the beds, and the pictures torn off the walls. There was no way to tell whether the looters had been looking for something specific (a safe? a hidden cache of jewelry? a gun?) or simply hungry for destruction.

The roof collapsed in 2147, after a season of unusually heavy rain. The walls on the second floor fell away not long afterwards, leaving a squatty, oddly proportioned building with a staircase that led to ruin and open air.

In the years since the years since the collapse and in the years before, the first floor housed a succession of squatters. Refugees immediately after the war, ghouls for years afterwards, then tribals and vault escapees before the emergence of the Fiends. It was a chem den for a dozen years before Motor Runner settled in Vault 3 and pulled the Fiends into the no-man's land around the Vault.

Sometimes, a traveler would find their way into the butcher's shop and spend a restless night on a dirty mattress, listening for the sound of approaching footsteps and the laughter of one of the outlying Fiend bosses. Most days, it sat empty, waiting for the wind and gravity to pull the last of its walls down and tumble a thousand pounds of brick and mortar.

Adoración Ruiz used the butcher's shop as a hideout when night caught her alone in Fiend territory. She was a mercenary and a courier, a woman accustomed to taking care of herself, but she wasn't so cocky as to think herself invincible. She knew the value of a good hiding place, and they didn't come much better than the basement of a forgotten pre-war building.

The basement was where the long-ago butcher had taken carcasses and reduced them into their component parts. It was where dead things became meat and were trussed up for sale. The floor was sloped, slanted gently downwards into a rusted-through grate. There were tables with gutters on the side and storage underneath for cleavers and knives. It was a place where an unsanitary business could be concluded with a minimum of fuss.

Years ago, the man who owned the building, the butcher whose name was printed in faded letters on the awning that had once hung over the wide window, had died in that basement. He died with a pistol in one hand and a photograph of his wife and daughter clenched in the other. His blood drained from his body and ran into the grate while his body began decomposition.

Adoración did not know this. She had rolled the bones into the corner and covered them with a tarp, and she had taken stock of the rusted cleavers and knives in their bin underneath the elevated table with the gutters. There was nothing worth anything to her, so she left the butcher's artifacts as they were and settled down to sleep in a corner far away from the old man's bones.

She returned to the butcher's basement often enough that she began to leave things there for her comfort. She build up a stash of food, armor, and ammunition, along with other essentials for survival, a lamp and a bedroll and a few lengths of rope. It wasn't comfortable, but it was a good safe house, and the door had a sturdy lock.

And though she would never admit it, she liked its proximity to Camp McCarran and Corporal Betsy. It made it easier to claim she had been 'in the neighborhood' when she stopped in for a visit. She'd been sleeping with Betsy for several months, and what had started out as purely physical had gained complexity and emotional heft. It changed from a fling to a serial hook-up to something else entirely, and Adoración didn't know why she was still making excuses to herself. She loved Betsy, though she was reluctant to say those words out loud.

And when Betsy confessed, unexpectedly, that she had once spent a night as Cook-Cook's captive and unwilling toy, Adoración had cried from rage. It was ironic that she was the one being soothed when Betsy had been the victim, but the shock that someone she cared about had fallen prey to one of the most notorious hunters in the Mojave shut down her rational mind.

The next morning, she promised she wouldn't do anything rash, but the mercenary wasn't one for promises.

She spent a week planning. She decided to set her trap in her hideout in the basement of the abandoned butcher shop. She knew that what she was doing was incredibly dangerous, but there was no room in her mind for bloodlust and reason.

She would be the bait, a vulnerable young woman hiding out behind an unlocked door in Fiend territory, a mile and a half from anyone that would care if something happened to her.

She made her way through Fiend territory at noon, passing by Cook-Cook's camp. There was a gentleman's agreement among the fiends that any woman traveling alone belonged to the stinking bastard, and if there was anything left when he was through, she was fair game for the rest of them. As far as Adoración knew, the last time one of the Fiends broke the rule, Cook-Cook took let the woman go and roasted the man in her place.

She paused in the empty door frame of the butcher's shop and opened her palm with her combat knife. She smeared her blood on the lintel, and settled in to wait.

Cook-Cook took the bait just after four thirty that afternoon. Adoración was ready for him. She cracked him across the skull with the butt of her shotgun. He toppled like a wall falling, and she bound him, hands and knees before he had the chance to recover. She worked methodically, cutting his armor away and sliding his filthy trousers down around his knees. He stank of garbage and human waste, terror and sweat. Adoración gagged, and for a moment, her resolve flagged She wasn't quite prepared for what she was going to do, but it was for Betsy, it was for Pretty Sarah, it was for any woman and every woman who had found herself at his mercy.

When he realized what she was doing, he tried to talk her down.

"Sweet thing, if you wanna play, all you gotta do is ask."

She ignored him, just laid her shotgun on his ass and steeled herself.

"Let me up, baby girl, and we can have some real fun."

There was a crack in his bravado, a sliver of genuine terror. She was a predator, and he was her prey. His unguarded fear was sweet as blood in the water.

Something about him reminded her of Benny. The pet names and the misplaced familiarity, the come-ons and the uncertainty about whether or not this tiny Columbian girl would really be the one to kill him. She held the image in her mind and thrust the barrel of her shotgun into his ass.

He screamed when she penetrated him, and again when she pulled it out and forced it back into him. He thrashed, but the ropes held, and she was relentless. She didn't care about pain or pleasure, she just wanted him to know what it felt like to be powerless and alone and completely at the mercy of someone who didn't care much whether you lived or died.

She didn't really know how long she kept it up. He was bleeding when she was through, and there was something vile on the barrel of her shotgun. He wasn't crying, but he was making a sound like wind whistling through a broken window, high-pitched and pitiful. His whimpers ended in wheezes and coughs, but he'd given up asking her to stop.

"You like that, bastard? You like that, you ugly son of a bitch?" He didn't respond, and she didn't expect him to. She planted her foot in his ribs, kicking him hard enough to roll him onto his side. He drew his knees up to his chest and stared at the wall, a faraway look in his glassy eyes.

"You gonna kill me now?" he rumbled, his voice hoarse. "Because I'm sorry. All those girls... I'm sorry."

Adoración turned away. She hadn't had much of a plan, but she didn't know how to proceed.

"What was her name?"

She raised an eyebrow and looked at the man lying on the floor in a pool of his own filth. He seemed smaller without his armor, defeated, like a stray tin soldier that had rolled under the bed and out of reach of his owner.

"Betsy," she said without emotion. "Her name is Betsy."

Cook-Cook was silent for a moment, then chuckled. "I remember her. Sniper bitch, had that scrawny fuck with her. She cried, but I shut her up real quick." He was laughing when she screamed, he was laughing when she closed her hands around his thick neck, still laughing as she tried to throttle him, impotent in her fury.

She was strong, built small and sturdy, and she couldn't fit her hands all the way around his neck. He was done, down for the count, but he was thick as a super mutant, corded with muscle. Adoración sat back on her haunches, staring around the basement with eyes as empty as blue skies over salt flats. Her gaze fell on the bin under the butchers' table, the one with the gutters on the side.

The knives and cleavers were covered in rust; the blades had lost their edge years ago. But they were sharp enough to break flesh, sever tendons, and break bones provided the person using them was willing to work at it.

For the first time in over two hundred years, red blood ran down the butcher's knives and into the drain on the floor, and Adoración relished every second of it. Her father taught her to take pride in her work, and she did, removing limbs from their sockets and tearing through tissues. It was vile, but the butcher's basement was designed for such tasks, and before long, she'd reduced a big man to smaller pieces.

She wasn't one for trophies, but Cook-Cook's head was worth 250 caps, so she cut it from his thick neck and tucked it in her knapsack.

She left the rest of him where it was, in the basement of a decomposing building made of gold brick on the outskirts of a city that had been called Las Vegas two hundred years earlier.


End file.
